Cruz reprimanded the former Republican Nebraska senator for failing to submit to the Armed Services Committee speeches from the past five years. Cruz said Hagel submitted just four speeches, even though records showed he had been paid for 12 in the past year alone.

Playing snippets of a 2009 Al Jazeera interview with Hagel, Cruz launched into a series of questions challenging his views on Israel. When asked if he thought Israel had committed war crimes, Hagel said no and added that Cruz had taken his response in the interview out of context.

Cruz also took issue with Hagel’s 2006 characterization of Israel’s military campaign against the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as “sickening slaughter.”

Hagel again said he’d want to look at the full context of that quote but wasn’t able to finish his sentence before Cruz jumped back to the 2009 interview, this time featuring a caller asking about the perception of the U.S. as “the world’s bully.” Hagel said that while he called the observation “a good one” and “relevant” during that interview, that didn’t mean he agreed with it.

Cruz, in turn, accused him of broadcasting propaganda to countries hostile to the U.S.

“To explicitly agree with the characterization of the United States as the ‘world’s bully,’ I would suggest is not the conduct one would expect of a Secretary of Defense,” Cruz said.

Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., attempted to run interference for Hagel, saying he had told Cruz earlier that he preferred to work from transcripts instead of tapes. Levin also said he didn’t interpret some of the interview quite the way Cruz did.